Exploring: Remote Sensing

The surface of the Earth is changing rapidly, at local, regional, national, even global scales, with significant repercussions for people, the economy, and the environment. Remote sensing satellites and aircraft monitor the Earth providing information that is broad, precise, impartial, and easily available. In addition to operating the Landsat satellites, USGS provides the Nation's portal to the largest archive of remotely sensed land data in the world, supplying continuous access to current and historical land images worldwide.

The semi-arid Great Basin region in the Northwest U.S. is impacted by a suite of change agents including fire, grazing, and climate variability to which native vegetation can have low resilience and resistance. Assessing ecosystem condition in relation to these change agents is difficult due to a lack of a consistent and objective Site Potential (...

Multichannel seismic lines acquired during the 2018 MATRIX program are shown in yellow, with the locations of sonobuoy deployments indicated by orange crosses. Dotted black line is the track of the R/V Hugh R. Sharp when seismic data were not being acquired. The MATRIX surveys sampled through three large areas (purple) identified by...

EarthNow! displays near-real time imagery of Landsat 7 and Landsat 8 data being collected by USGS as the satellites cross over the Earth. Along with live stream video, the tool also replays image loops from a list of recent overpass recordings. https://earthnow.usgs.gov/observer/